Page 225 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

206 INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY
dimensional one: small wonder then that, just as creative writers had proved
reluctant to furnish scripts, so theatre actors had also proved reluctant to act on
film. This, Shumyatsky agreed, was also partly because of the loss of live contact
with the audience but mainly because cinema did not use the actor efficiently. He
cited the particular instance of the actor Naum Rogozhin who, in the period
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January-September 1935, worked for only six full days. Rationalisation of acting
commitments was another problem to be dealt with by the annual thematic plan,
for the actor’s role was in fact quite central:

The Soviet actor creates the popularity of our art. The creative success of
cinema is to a significant extent based on the success of our acting resources. 59

The role of the actor is yet another aspect of Soviet cinema that we in the West
have tended to overlook.
If, as Shumyatsky thought, the problem of Soviet cinema lay with the
predominance of the director at the particular expense of the scriptwriter and the
actor, the obvious question then arose as to how the imbalance could be rectified.
Shumyatsky’s answer lay in a collective approach in which the plot outline, then
the script and then the rushes would be discussed by all concerned to eliminate
errors and infelicities at the earliest possible stage; significantly that collective
approach was to include the management of the film industry and by clear
implication and known practice also direct representatives of the Party–for each
film there was to be in effect a thematic plan in microcosm. Shumyatsky’s
argument ran like this:

The creation of a film is a collective process because a film unites the
creative potential of many of its participants, from the scriptwriter and the
director to the actor, the composer, the designer, the cameraman–and
beginning and ending with the management…. The time has come at last to
speak unequivocally of the direct creative participation of the management in
a film because it is the management that accepts the script and the general
plan (and often even the plot outline), the management that criticises and
makes suggestions and corrections, views the filmed material and asks for
changes if those changes are necessary, it is the management that accepts
films and so on and, it must be admitted, it is the management that often
authors (without copyright!) both the plan and the details of a work. 60

It was the management that would direct film-makers, as indeed Shumyatsky
directed Eisenstein. In 1934 he praised him for his return to the notions of plot and
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acting and for his renewed theatrical activity. But in March 1937 he ordered him
to stop work on Bezhin Meadow [Bezhin lug] because he had wasted 2 million
roubles, indulged in ‘harmful Formalistic exercises’, and produced work that was
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‘anti-artistic and politically quite unsound’. Shumyatsky admitted ‘that I bear the
responsibility for all this as head of GUK [Gosudarstvennoe upravlenie